How A Quartz Watch Works?
Before the era of quartz watches, people used to have wind-up watches. For a very long time, wind-up watches were considered the best timekeeping instruments around. Let us examine the features of a wind-up watch, before we see the workings of a quartz watch.
The winding mechanism of a wind-up watch consists of a spring wound to provide it with power. There is an oscillator, referred to as a balance wheel, to show the time on the watch. Every watch contains a dial with evenly placed numbers and two hands of the watch that depict hours and minutes. Governing the movements of the watch, there are gears that link everything.
A straight forward and simple way of keeping time is the wind-up watch. Wind-up watches do have some drawbacks. If you ever forgot to wind it up, you used to get an inaccurate time because the watch used to run out of power. The precision of these watches has always been unsure. The accuracy of the watch was also in question since you were never sure of the matching and making of gears, spring and oscillator. The function of precision was dependent on winding of the watch; when the spring wound down, it would slow down the oscillator and give inexact time.
In 1960s, there came some advancement in wind-up watches. The spring was replaced with battery, so you did not need to wind up the watch. The oscillator was replaced with a tuning fork that worked on frequency. However, the main issue of accuracy could not be addressed. Another development was the introduction of integrated circuits, but they were tended to be heavy because of their larger size. To overcome all these issues, quartz watches were introduced.
A slim piece of synthetic quartz is used in quartz watches to measure time. Synthetic quartz is preferred over natural quartz because of its consistency. To generate vibration in the quartz clock, electric charge is applied. This vibration is necessary to keep the precise time. All modern watches today use quartz.
Batteries are used to power most quartz watches today. However, some are powered by tiny kinetic generators that work by the movement of the wrist. Electricity is created when the tiny rotors in the watch spin with the wrists movement and powers the watch. Just as in a wind-up watch, a quartz watch also has an oscillator. But in this case, quartz serves as the oscillator that moves steadily. Time on your watch is indicated by the oscillator.
Quartz is considered as a perfect material because it loses very little energy when it vibrates. The vibrations stay steady and exhibit piezoelectric effect.
Losing less than one minute in accuracy per year, quartz watches are considered better than the mechanical watches, because they are more accurate. The long term accuracy of a mechanical watch is always questionable, because it depends on many factors like its making and quality; quartz does not suffer from these drawbacks. Quartz watches do not need any winding while mechanical watches cannot work without it. A quartz watch lasts nearly forever, and only needs a battery replacement to keep it functional. If you wish to buy a watch, make the digital quartz watch your preference.
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